Language and languages, mostly but not always about English

02/02/2009

Between you and … ?

A few days ago I found myself at lunch with an Englishman who informed me with horror that he had been to see the film Australia and had seen between you and me subtitled as entre tú y yo. He insisted that it should be entre ti y mí, these being the prepositional forms of the pronouns. I told him that entre tú y yois how it is said in Spanish, and finally, after an appeal to a Spanish friend who was with us, he accepted that I must be right however ‘illogical’ this was in Spanish.

What about English? It is often said that the use of between you and I is an example of hypercorrection; people have been told so often not to say You and me were there that they say you and I when they shouldn’t do so. No doubt there is something in that but it can’t be the whole story. The OED says (I pers. pron. B2.):

2. Sometimes used for the objective after a verb or preposition, esp. when separated from the governing word by other words. This was very frequent in end [sic] of 16th and in 17th c., but is now considered ungrammatical.

The qualification that it makes (my emphasis) is interesting.

One quotation that it gives (1596) is from Shakespeare: All debts are clear’d betweeneyou and I, (TheMerchantof Venice, Act 3, scene 2). It has another from 1698 but its quotations from 1866 and 1959 are critical of the usage.

If the usage was ‘very frequent’ 400 years ago, hypercorrection cannot really be the whole reason for its use nowadays.

As for It’s me, the OED only quotes examples in the sense of it suits me e.g. I like this dress, it’s me. Nevertheless, the use of it’s me to mean I am here, I am the person you can hear is so widespread as to be hard to criticise, as is the use of me in sentences such as He’s bigger than me. Randolph Quirk’s Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language gets round this problem by talking of ‘object territory’, meaning that the object is usually at the end of the sentence, so when a pronoun is in that position the tendency is to use the object form whatever the actual grammatical structure may be in classical terms.

In these cases Spanish has Soy yo (literally I am I) and Él es más grande que yo (than I with no alternative). In French, Louis XIV did not say L’état, c’est je; French has what they call the disjunctive pronoun so they can say C’est moi and Il est plus grand que moi. The German forms are Ich bin es (I am it) and Er ist gröβer als ich (again, than I with no alternative).

Comments

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‘Between you and I’ (as well as ‘between you and me’) seems to be used only when confidentiality is sought and even then only in that particular phrase. ‘Between you, I and the gatepost’ is unlikely, and all of the following must surely be inadmissible:

‘This is between you and he (or she).’
‘This is between you and we.’
‘This is between you and they.’

The authors of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language seem to have a similar problem over what they have to say about the use of ‘I’ when it is the object of a sentence in coordination, as in ‘They invited my partner and I to lunch’. They argue persuasively that the case cannot be made that it must be ‘me’ because that’s what it would be on its own. They refer to another instance in English where a pronoun behaves differently in coordination from the way it behaves on its own. They do not, however, attempt to reconcile their view with what happens in other persons and numbers. ‘They invited her partner and she to lunch’, They invited his partner and he to lunch’, They invited our partners and we to lunch’, and ‘They invited their partners and they to lunch’ all seem to me to deserve an asterisk in front of them.

The question - Why is the first person singular an exception? - remains unanswered in both the post-prepositional and the objective instances.

Thank you for that very interesting comment. I cannot take it much further because I am in temporary accommodation while my flat is completely rebuilt internally and both my Comprehensive Grammar and Cambridge Grammar are in storage.

I might mention that the Shakespeare example of 'between you and I' is not seeking confidentiality, and that in this case English seems to have what could be regarded as an optional form where the 'I' is seen as fixed and impervious to the effect of prepositions.

This seems a bit similar to the Spanish formula, where 'entre' (but no other preposition) is followed by the subject form of all pronouns.